And many of those corporate "universities" have been cut back significantly.

Check out Dr. Peter Cappelli's "Why Good People Can't Get Jobs" or a summary of his work at http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/0... -- One of his explanations is that companies no longer want to spend to train new employees in the skills they need.

Excellent points. That was the setup we had, and fortunately my public HS was way ahead of its time offering programming as an elective to all students. Once I took it, I was hooked.

I can't justify requiring everyone to take it, however. There's also a shortage of physicians, so why not start teaching everyone organic chemistry in HS? Oh, right, not everyone would do well and it would also lead to an oversupply, which would depress incomes for doctors. And the AMA would make certain that would never happen... unlike engineering's professional organizations.

Was Oracle University an internal-only division? I know of a few organizations that have similar structures that are only for employees - makes it easier to shift them between division if they understand more than one product.

When I was in high school (back in the stone ages) in a small town in Virginia, it was REQUIRED that all 8th graders have one semester of Computer Literacy. Period. We had to learn keyboarding, word processing (with Word Perfect 5.1), spreadsheets (Multiplan) and simple databases (Paradox) as part of the curriculum.

Now, granted, this isn't programming, but for a small, "backwoods" Virginia public school system to be thinking like this during the Reagan administration speaks volumes.

Of course, we also had the option to take Computer Science I (BASIC), CS II (Pascal), CS III (C, although the only person to ever make it to CS III was already versed enough in C that he could have taught the class). I ended up taking CS I when I was a senior, just to have something to do and could have taught the class since I had been programming in BASIC (interpreted and otherwise) since the early 80s.

What I think would be much more important than teaching the syntax of a specific language or package would be to teach basic software engineering skills - being able to look at a problem logically, apply logic to solving that problem, develop a strategy of solving that problem and then implementing the code to solve it.

Teach the entire software development lifecycle, not simply something with a little more depth than being able to put "Hello, World!" in a window on a screen using a specific language on a specific platform. I believe the idea of transferrable skills is going to be much more important when a student goes on to higher education than it will be to know how to write code in a specific language.

Real world example time - how many folks learned COBOL 30+ years ago that kept up with technology and now code in something like Java, Ruby, etc.? Does knowing COBOL syntax really help with modern programming languages? Now, does knowing how to create, organize and analyze code translate better for use with more modern languages? Technology changes, students need skills that can keep up with those changes.

All of that said, should /everyone/ know /something/ about programming? Indeed - especially with the advent of the consumerization of technology upon us. Knowing how to do simple troubleshooting of an app or whatever is going to be critical when everyone is wandering around with a smartphone, tablet, wearable computer (or combination of all three). Does everyone necessarily need to know how to write web code to do SQL queries? Not in my mind.

And finally, the best class that I ever took was actually classified as a Philosophy course, but was a requirement for all engineering, sciences and computer science majors as well. Odd, right? Well, one would think that (Symbolic) Logic and Critical Thinking would be a more popular and more widely required, but at least not at that school. If you teach kids (or people) how to think, you open the entire world up to them.

Are you sure about Oracle and Microsoft? I worked at Oracle for 10 years and took class after class of all sorts of programming. They even had a division called Oracle University. Has this stopped or are you just assuming?I do know that it might be cheaper to import Indian programmers under phony H1B visas (rather than train US workers) because there was a lot of that going on too...

Authoring systems were supposed to make both programming languages and programmers obsolete 20 years ago; yet we still have both. And to the extent that authoring systems were used, the people best at using them were programmers.

For better or worse, it's a lot easier to be precise and efficient with the written word, then with either the spoken word or a GUI. I don't expect that to change.

First of all, I don't think there's a shortage of programmers. If there were, then programmers would make more and the unemployment rate for them would be a lot lower; and employers would be a lot less picky when hiring them (they might even be willing to train people, like my father was trained by the U.S. Marine Corps back in 1966 before there were any academic CS programs). Rather, this appears to be an effort to artificially inflate supply, helping to minimize labor costs.

Second, I don't think everybody has the aptitude for programming, just as not everybody has the aptitude to play a musical instrument. Those who have it should be encouraged, as learning programming is the most effective way to learn how computers work, but I see no public benefit in teaching people who lack both the proper mindset and the desire to learn. There are things that every citizen should know (like history, civics, science, and clear thinking, in addition to the 3 R's); computer programming is not one of them, any more than auto mechanics is (arguably, the latter is more important).

That said, I do think programming should be offered to high school (and possibly middle school) students as an elective. It's a useful life skill, no matter what one ends up doing for a living, but we shouldn't pretend it's for everybody.

What happened to the free market and supply and demand? If you want more programmers, raise the salaries and benefits and more people will choose programming instead of accounting, engineering or an MBA for example. All those choices currently pay better than entry level programming so thats where the talent goes.

I once sought a short, introductory course to computers and ended up in a Fortran programming course. Ouch. It taught me a lot, mainly that I wasn't a very good programmer. Teaching computer languages is going to be passe very soon. Even professional programmers will work from programming workbenches in the cloud that can formulate routines in multiple languages and provide functions on a graphical design board without the user needing to write a stitch of code. The course that's needed is still an introductory course to computers -- one that teaches what they can do and can't do, and how humans still need to use their heads. Charlie Babcock, editor at large, InformationWeek

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.